Archiving Reproductive Health Anonymisation Protocol Published

The Archiving Reproductive Health project at the Digital Repository of Ireland has published a factsheet about the Anonymisation Protocol used in cataloguing the In Her Shoes collection.

The factsheet outlines the approaches taken by the project to anonymise some material in the In Her Shoes: Women of the Eighth collection, and the reasons for certain anonymisation and redaction decisions being taken.

The ‘In Her Shoes: Women of the Eighth’ Facebook was set up during the 2018 referendum to remove the constitutional ban on abortion in Ireland.
On the page, women shared their experiences of being denied access to abortion care in Ireland, both in recent years and in the 1980s and 1990s. It was an important factor in informing voters about the reality of life under the Eighth Amendment, and contributed to the decisive Yes vote which opened up access to abortion services in Ireland.

DRI and In Her Shoes opened discussions about preserving the stories in 2018, and an initial export of the data from the Facebook page was carried out that year.
The work picked up again with the start of the Archiving Reproductive Health project, and staff were hired specifically to work with the In Her Shoes data and develop a strategy for archiving it in the long term.

In 2022, ARH carried out a new and comprehensive export of the data from the In Her Shoes page. The next challenge involved analysing these stories and identifying where anonymisation may be required for data protection and privacy.

The factsheet describes this challenge, explores initial approaches that were adopted and later modified, and explains the considerations taken by the team in adopting these approaches.  ARH are making this document freely available to download, in the hope that it may be of use to social science researchers and people working with personal data in their research datasets.

The factsheet can be downloaded from the Repository at https://doi.org/10.7486/DRI.8910zn364